Prof. Susan N. Herman

Susan N. Herman served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 2008 to 2021, after twenty years on the ACLU’s National Board of Directors, and, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg before her, as the ACLU’s General Counsel. She taught at Brooklyn Law School for forty-six years, where she held the Centennial Professorship and, from 2020, was the school’s inaugural Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law, teaching constitutional law, criminal procedure, and terrorism and civil liberties; she retired from the faculty in 2026. She is the author of Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy, and her writing on civil liberties has appeared widely in scholarly and popular publications.